Pages

Sunday, 13 December 2015

Make the Yuletide Gay : 3

After my previous two
Advent articles in which we celebrated the Christmas season in song we’ll now
celebrate by taking the advice we read last weekend and “Deck the Halls”.There are some people who
put up a Christmas tree in October! They assume that seeing them in the shops
means Christmas has actually begun – traditionally you shouldn’t put them up
before Christmas Eve, and leave them up till February 1st, they say
that doing different is bad luck or attracts evil spirits depending on which
country you live in, assuming your country has Christmas trees, of course. But
I’m sure most of us will have put some kind of decoration up by now. I tend to
prefer some natural decorations – real holly, ivy and that kind of thing.Today we’ll look at
another carol, “The Holly and the Ivy” and see how these plants are highly
appropriate for making our Yuletide “gay”.

The use of natural plants
to decorate homes during winter is as old as civilisation itself, even older.
Some historians still hold on to the pre-Victorian fantasy of thinking the use
of greenery is always ritual. There’s no historical reason to assume that in
all cases. People decorated their homes for the same reason we do today. Why do
we paint our walls? Why do we hang pictures and photos on walls? Because our
living spaces would be dull and boring without them, and the ancient peoples
were just as capable of making the same choice.Holly is a good example.
People were decorating their homes with holly long before any ritual meaning
was attached to it. Today a lot is written about the early Christians giving
holly a new meaning by equating the thorns on the leaves with Christ’s crown of
thorns. This was to persuade those very devout worshippers (today we might call
them puritans, or perhaps fundamentalists) that there was no evil in placing
holly in homes or places of worship.Holly is one of many
evergreens to have two sexes. Trees with berries are regarded as female and
those that carry to pollen as male. It is known that these trees can, very
occasionally, swap sex. A partial transformation took place recently in one of
the world’s oldest evergreen trees, the Fortingall Yew. Tradition says that
this Scottish tree is about 5,000 years old – that’s older than Stonehenge! It’s
actually only about 2,000 years old, but that’s still VERY old.

This illustration shows
you what the tree looked like in 1822. Yews are also trees which have lots of
ancient legends attached to them, and they are one of the few trees you can
find in almost every British church graveyard.In October this year
botanists from the Royal Botanical Garden in Edinburgh discovered that one
branch of the ancient tree had grown berries. In its entire recorded history
the Fortigall Yew has been “male” and has never produced berries. Some of the
media got into a frenzy over this “transgender tree”.Trees like this yew can
switch sex all over, not just one branch, and botanists believe the change has
occurred because the tree is so split and divided that the branch in question
produced berries as a fluke.Holly trees can also
change completely from one sex to another. Botanists believe it is a survival
mechanism and that changing sexes saves certain nutrients from being used up.That’s the holly, what about
the ivy?Ivy has different
associations depending on which part of the world you live in. In northern
Europe it was seen as a symbol of eternity and longevity due to it’s presence
throughout the year.In southern Europe ivy was
strongly associated with the Greek god Dionysos and his Roman incarnation
Bacchus, the gods of wine, pleasure, revelry, drunkenness and fertility. Greek
myth says that Dionysos had a mortal son called Kissos who died young. The
goddess Gaia took pity on Dionysos and turned Kissos into the ivy plant (kissos
is the Greek word for ivy). Ever since then Dionysos wore a wreath of ivy
around his head. Modern depictions, however, mistake this ivy wreath for vine
leaves which come from a totally different myth about Dionysos and the death of
his boyfriend Ampelos. This other myth made Dionysos god of homosexuality, or
same-sexual acts (Eros was the god of same-sex love and relationships).The early Roman Christian
church, especially in countries steeped in the Greek and Roman myths, had a
problem with worshippers bringing ivy, Dionysos’ssymbol of pleasure and fertility, into holy
places (too much like uncontrolled, drunken sex, they thought). The Celtic
Christians in the north had no such qualms. Perhaps the Roman church played on
ivy’s northern associations with longevity and eternal life and came to adopt
it as a symbol of Christ’s promise of eternal life.The strongest link between
ivy and Dionysos and Bacchus comes in their specific emblem called the thyrsus.
This is a wand made from the stalk of a fennel plant topped with a pine cone.
Around the stalk is entwined ivy. Academics say this thyrsus is represents the
male penis (academics like bringing sex into things). Dionysos’s followers and
servants carried a thyrsus at all of his hedonistic celebrations and rituals.So, what could any lgbt
seasonal celebration be complete without a bit of holly, ivy and a few pine
cones?Now that we’ve Decked the
Halls let’s hear a rendition of the “The Holly and the Ivy” itself. Here’s the
Denver Women’s Chorus.

No comments:

Post a Comment

About Me

I was born during a thunderstorm in the summer of 1960 and was brought up in a village in north Nottinghamshire. I attended the sort of school which practiced “history for girls, geography for boys”, but developed a love of history none-the-less.